Ponente
Descripción
Huge volumes of liquid argon (LAr) are widely used today in particle and nuclear physics experiments, especially in the detection of weak interacting particles such as neutrinos (e.g. DUNE, SBND, ICARUS, ...) and dark matter (e.g. Darkside, ArDM, …). The characterisation of the liquid argon and the monitoring of the performance of the recirculation systems play a key role in ensuring the optimal detection performance of such detection systems. High resolution temperature distributions characterising gradients of few hundredths of a degree, provide insights on the quality of the purification of the noble liquid and enables a quick alert to changes on the operation of the recirculation system if required. Furthermore, temperature measurements in conjunction with computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations can be used for detector calibration purposes.
IFIC is fully committed to the R&D of large-scale temperature monitoring systems (TMS) for liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPC), having acquired considerable expertise in the resistance temperature detection (RTD) technique over the last decade. The design of the temperature readout hardware, cables, and RTD supports, as well as the calibration system play a key role in obtaining the required temperature resolution. The first large-scale device, monitoring the temperature over a 8 m-high vertical LAr column with 3 mK resolution, has been operated at CERN in the large-scale DUNE prototype. This arrangement guarantees excellent temperature resolution for a large number of sensors, making them ideal to instrument large TPCs. Furthermore, an intense R&D on Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors is being carried out simultaneously with the aim of setting up a Fiber-based TMS (FTMS) for high electric field environments. The FTMS will increase the number of temperature measurement points while preserving the resolution obtained with the RTD based system.
